By Dean TakahashiMercury NewsIn a bid to capture the huge audience for handheld entertainment gadgets, Microsoft is designing a product that combines games, music and video in one handheld device, according to sources familiar with the project.

Yep. Someone oughta tell the folks at M$ to concentrate on shipping Vista/Longhorn, bighorn, ultrahorny, or whatever the darn thing is called these days.

Most high-tech companies keep fridges stocked with free beverages. Microsoft should get rid of their fridges and replace them with bookshelves containing free copies of Fred Brook's seminal "The Mythical Man-Month", which describes in detail what happens to operating system projects that have too many programmers. After hanging around WWDC for a couple of years meeting Apple folks, I can say that they definitely understand the pitfalls illustrated in this book. Which is why they are able to shoot new versions of OSX out the door at regular intervals. If I was billg@microsoft.com I'd probably feel more powerful than god as well. But, the saying goes, you cannot break the law, you can only break yourself against the law.

Another key thought on software engineering in the large which applies here is Grady Booch's notion that successive refinement is the key to achieving a robust system, not a huge break from tradition. OSX may be new to Apple, but it is anything but 'new' technology. Instead, each year, they roll new fresh improvements into OSX. Accumulated innovation over four revisions of the OS is what we're looking at right now. Not grandstanding.

Vista is doomed. WinTel will remain a Win32/Win64 hybrid until everyone switches to a future VMWARE+MacIntel.